All tagged senses
This is a study of flowers and garlands in Tamil South India as they travel through temples and markets and are grown, sold, and bought by a variety of communities. Various threads of sensory engagements, including colors, fragrances, and the clamor of the market and festive temple grounds, all accumulate into a sense of community aesthetics and sensational forms, from which a devotee might draw to participate.
Our Summer 2020 issue on the theme of Innovation is the second of a two-part series that explores instances of creativity and change drawn from various parts of the globe – India, Thailand, and the Western world. Our offerings include a photo essay on jugaad practices among costumers in the Indian film industry, a photo essay on sensory and community aesthetics in a South Indian flower market, a photo essay on care practices and questions of change in Thailand, and an article by Aimee Hinds on how color (or its absence) perpetuates false racial narratives in modern classical reception of the Greco-Roman past.
Singapore is renowned for being a multi-ethnic, multi-religious haven, home to a plethora of religious communities that live in putative harmony because they tolerate and respect each other’s differences. This paper tries to modulate such a narrative, through an original study of the shared multi-sensorial, multi-religious space at the Sri Krishnan Temple in Singapore. It is argued that sameness, not difference, reigns there and that this is possible because Hinduism, or for that matter, lived religion, is mediated through the senses.
